Photos - Collage

Before I began my focus creating panoramas I created photo collages. This
started in my final year studying photography at the
New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, back in 1990. I
would make two contact sheet from the photo shoot. One would go with the
negatives the other one I cut up into individual frames. Here are a few
examples of some of the first collages I made.

Some family and friends engaged in role playing game in my parents basement.

Students doing their drawing homework.

Someone getting a haircut at a local salon.

Friend playing in a bar.

My interest in creating photo collages was mostly inspired by the works of
David Hockney. His photo collage work is best know for the image of pearblossom-highway, Hockney shoot more than
60 rolls of film over 9 days. The final collage used more than 1000, 4X6
prints, less than half of what was taken. He was not concerned about
the quality of the prints, he is foremost a painter and not a photographer, the
camera was just a tool. He used 110 film camera, but one of the best
there was, a Pentax SLR that actually held the film flat and used a glass
lens. He had the prints developed at a corner drugstore and used the
varyings colors that bad 1 hours labs unavoidably create to his advantage to
look like paint strokes.

But my favorite are the ones with people over a short period of time showing
motion or action, like
The Skater

I always thought as a photographer first. The quality of the individual
prints were important. Exposers were locked when taking the pictures and
when creating the prints. For aesthetic reasons, duplicate prints
were never made to be put into a collage. I Never used more than one
of each picture, but I never forced myself to use all of them either.

After evaluating the many miniature collages I selected four to create
larger projects from. I enlarged each of the selected images and
printed them full frame onto 8X10 paper giving about 6 3/4
X 10 inch prints. I arranged and glued the enlargements onto 4 X 6 foot boards.

Cubist approach. Images taken from many slightly different angles.

Capturing the motion of the performer as he played his guitar through a period
of time. Most of the movement was created by the performer some by the
position of the images.

Capturing the motion of the performer as he played his guitar through a period
of time. The motion is created mostly by the position of the images.

Partial cubist approach. Covering the entire end of the room in a grid,
but modifying camera position slightly so that each image captured is
complete.

The progression from collage to panoramas continued over the next couple of
years. Although I took many outdoor cylinder panorama these are the
more interesting ones from the time.

In 1991 I learned how to properly pan and tilt the camera and keep the lens
over the nodal point. The edges of the middle row line up but the sides
of the top and bottom row have duplicate information. The
equipment I used.

I noticed that if the camera was not kept completely level when joining the
images together they formed a curve. Here I was trying to create a
complete circle by tilting the camera up quite a bit. This is not
actually possible this way.

This picture shows some of the tall buildings in down town Calgary.

My next step was to hand print the pictures and increase the perspective of
looking up at the buildings, by tilting the paper while exposing the image onto
it. I later found this was not possible because the lab cut through every
third negative.

I tried again to create a full circle. This time I did not line up the images perfectly.
On the wall in the bottom left is part of one of the larger photo collages
I have done. This one shows hot air balloons taking off.

Someday soon I will scan the negatives of the balloons and create a digital
photo collage of it.

It was not until after Jan 1995 when Apple released Quick Time VR software,
that software for creating panoramas and viewing them on a computer became available.
Other companies quickly started to create their own software.

By 1997 I was stitching photos together on the computer. The first thing I
did was go back through some of my negatives from when I was cutting and
sticking photos together and made these panoramas of the
Family of Man from that time.